[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"gql:data:MONBxYgYEhGUyk6f2DwO_Kk0nVufpNZxVFSOnBQAUmQ":3,"gql:data:P1L-3F4yLFT8Sm-6QpbQIoqRmZ3TevlXAnhvTQmaZho":57,"gql:data:rKgH68L4wSPvIueVKA1W3BjuSms3y5LqFyC6HZAv-oU":64,"gql:data:yxtepiAIgU6wIBqK3wYdgLRWg-QNgf2zDL8SSTsBMXA":70,"gql:data:qmJY4-503CHlJg4_ZSHARjkzFPaXzbxV7BFMovCRKYg":79,"gql:data:tyCI5HNt1HZczdKwWSz9r1bpaSHHrboaGtCGGtlkHBc":85,"gql:data:wRyxUzhhuHHOd-5qBLK7cwdnTlZ9WAHtJqnRKAvyIjs":157,"gql:data:HT7XK9L7FevXFqeorguiilMT3M34fS21-YSozsBn3eg":406},{"globalSet":4},{"id":5,"handle":6,"heading":7,"image":8,"contacts":17,"address":28,"networks":35,"richSubtitle":52,"richText":54,"links":56},"2","identity","Ibraaz",[9],{"id":10,"path":11,"alt":12,"title":13,"width":14,"height":15,"mimeType":16},"47","building.png",null,"Building",1536,1024,"image/png",[18,23],{"title":19,"contactLink":20},"General",{"value":21,"defaultLabel":22},"mailto:enquiries@ibraaz.org","enquiries@ibraaz.org",{"title":24,"contactLink":25},"Press",{"value":26,"defaultLabel":27},"mailto:press@ibraaz.org","press@ibraaz.org",[29],{"title":30,"countryCode":31,"addressLine1":32,"addressLine2":12,"addressLine3":12,"locality":33,"postalCode":34},"Location","GB","93 Mortimer Street","London","W1W 7SS",[36,40,44,48],{"title":37,"path":38},"Instagram",{"url":39},"https://www.instagram.com/ibraazlondon/",{"title":41,"path":42},"Facebook",{"url":43},"https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61583823886627",{"title":45,"path":46},"YouTube",{"url":47},"https://www.youtube.com/@ibraazlondon",{"title":49,"path":50},"Bluesky",{"url":51},"https://bsky.app/profile/ibraaz.bsky.social",{"html":53},"\u003Cp>Opening hours\u003C/p>",{"html":55},"\u003Cp>Wed - Sun: 11am - 6pm\u003C/p>",[],{"globalSet":58},{"id":59,"handle":60,"heading":61,"richText":62},"37","forms","Culture is a work in progress. Stay updated.",{"html":63},"\u003Cp>By subscribing to our newsletter you are agreeing to receiving updates and communications from Ibraaz.\u003C/p>",{"entries":65},[66],{"uri":67,"title":68,"typeHandle":69},"ibraaz-publishing/read/opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire","Opacity as Resistance: Reversing the Image Politics of Empire","longForm",{"globalSet":71},{"id":72,"handle":73,"activated":74,"heading":75,"richText":76,"text":78},"16767","notification",false,"Visitor Information",{"html":77},"\u003Cp>Please note that our Majlis is currently closed and will reopen with our next exhibition in early July. The rest of the building is open so please do visit!\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr /> \u003C/p>","Got it",{"globalSet":80},{"id":81,"handle":82,"heading":12,"richText":83},"11","gdpr",{"html":84},"\u003Cp>We use cookies to give you the best experience. By clicking 'Accept' you consent to the use of all cookies. \u003Ca href=\"/privacy-policy\">Privacy Policy\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>",{"globalSet":86},{"id":87,"handle":88,"linksGroups":89},"128","navigation",[90,96,127,133,139,145,151],{"title":91,"entry":92,"links":95},"What’s On",[93],{"uri":94},"whats-on",[],{"title":97,"entry":98,"links":101},"Publishing",[99],{"uri":100},"ibraaz-publishing",[102,107,112,117,122],{"title":103,"entry":104},"Writing Gaza",[105],{"uri":106},"ibraaz-publishing/writing-gaza",{"title":108,"entry":109},"Mission Statement",[110],{"uri":111},"ibraaz-publishing/mission-statement",{"title":113,"entry":114},"Read",[115],{"uri":116},"ibraaz-publishing/read",{"title":118,"entry":119},"Watch",[120],{"uri":121},"ibraaz-publishing/watch",{"title":123,"entry":124},"Listen",[125],{"uri":126},"ibraaz-publishing/listen",{"title":128,"entry":129,"links":132},"Visit Us",[130],{"uri":131},"visit-us",[],{"title":134,"entry":135,"links":138},"About Us",[136],{"uri":137},"about-us",[],{"title":140,"entry":141,"links":144},"Oula: Café-in-Residence",[142],{"uri":143},"oula-cafe",[],{"title":146,"entry":147,"links":150},"Maktaba: Bookshop-in-Residence",[148],{"uri":149},"maktaba-bookshop-in-residence",[],{"title":152,"entry":153,"links":156},"Contact Us",[154],{"uri":155},"contact-us",[],{"entry":158},{"id":159,"uri":67,"title":68,"slug":160,"postDate":161,"typeHandle":69,"sectionHandle":162,"meta":163,"readCategories":166,"writeCategories":170,"missionCategories":171,"figure":172,"pdf":173,"authorInfo":174,"richTitle":179,"richSubtitle":12,"richDescription":181,"richExcerpt":12,"image":183,"externalLinks":191,"entrySections":192,"related":340},"4544","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire","2025-10-14T09:31:00+01:00","read",[164],{"title":68,"description":12,"image":165},[],[167],{"title":168,"slug":169},"Essay","essay",[],[],[],[],[175],{"authorName":176,"authorBio":177},"Heba Y. Amin",{"html":178},"\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Heba Y. Amin\u003C/strong> is a visual artist, researcher, and Professor of Digital and Time-Based Art at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. She is cofounder of Black Athena Collective, curator of visual arts for \u003Ci>MIZNA journal\u003C/i>, and recently joined the board of Disruption Network Lab. \u003C/p>",{"html":180},"\u003Cp>Opacity as Resistance: Reversing the Image Politics of Empire\u003C/p>",{"html":182},"\u003Cp>Heba Y. Amin explores the history of the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate during WWII in Egypt. \u003C/p>",[184],{"id":185,"path":186,"alt":12,"title":187,"width":188,"height":189,"mimeType":190},"6021","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-8-Troops-carrying-a-dummy-Stuart-tank-3-April-1942.jpg","Fig 8 Troops carrying a dummy Stuart tank 3 April 1942",798,800,"image/jpeg",[],[193,213,219,232,235,255,258,278,281,300,303,307,312,324,332,335],{"typeHandle":194,"figures":195},"figures",[196,205],{"image":197,"caption":203},[198],{"id":199,"path":200,"alt":12,"title":201,"width":189,"height":202,"mimeType":190},"4621","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-1-Paintings-by-Colin-Moss-1943-Middle-East-Camouflage-Directorate-camoufleur.jpg","Fig 1 Paintings by Colin Moss 1943 Middle East Camouflage Directorate camoufleur",543,{"html":204},"\u003Cp>Colin Moss, \u003Ci>Middle East Camouflage Directorate camoufleur \u003C/i>(1943). A view along a roof top painted with camouflage patterns and textures. In the distance is a similarly painted building among several other industrial rooftops. © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 3026)\u003C/p>",{"image":206,"caption":211},[207],{"id":208,"path":209,"alt":12,"title":210,"width":189,"height":202,"mimeType":190},"4622","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-2-A-view-of-a-power-station-with-a-cooling-tower-painted-in-a-camouflage-pattern.jpg","Fig 2 A view of a power station with a cooling tower painted in a camouflage pattern",{"html":212},"\u003Cp>Colin Moss, \u003Ci>Middle East Camouflage Directorate camoufleur \u003C/i>(1943). A view of a power station with a cooling tower painted in a camouflage pattern. © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 3024)\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":215,"richText":217},"content",{"html":216},"1",{"html":218},"\u003Cp>In November 1941, at the height of the North African campaign, the British military established the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate on the outskirts of Cairo. Unlike the camouflage schools that had emerged during the First and Second World Wars, this was the only such institution founded on colonised territory. Its task was to train ‘camoufleurs’ – artists, theatre designers, architects, magicians, and zoologists – in the design of large-scale deceptions intended to mislead enemy reconnaissance. Under the direction of filmmaker Geoffrey Barkas (1896–1979), the unit developed schemes to conceal troops and infrastructure while also fabricating dummy installations to draw enemy fire. This moment in history is often remembered as an instance of creative ingenuity under wartime pressure; yet, when examined further, the Directorate reveals not only the tactical use of art for military ends but also the deep entanglement of camouflage with the colonial scopic regime. In other words, the camoufleurs were instrumentalising artistic vision through a political lens that enforced paradigms of colonial control and domination.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":220,"image":221,"caption":228,"width":230,"ratio":231},"figure",[222],{"id":223,"path":224,"alt":12,"title":225,"width":226,"height":227,"mimeType":190},"6023","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-6-Sunshield’-split-cover-one-half-on-one-half-off-a-tank.jpg","Fig 6 Sunshield split cover one half on one half off a tank",2739,1897,{"html":229},"\u003Cp>‘Sunshield’ split cover, one half on, one half off a tank in the workshops at Middle East Command Camouflage Development and Training Centre, Helwan, Egypt, 1941. Chiswick Chap / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.\u003C/p>","wide","landscape",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":233},{"html":234},"\u003Cp>Although Egypt had been granted nominal independence in 1922, British military occupation remained entrenched, with Cairo as the logistical hub of British imperial strategy in North Africa. To situate a camouflage training school in Egypt was to transform colonised land into a laboratory of deception, a stage for the exercise of military imagination. Operation Bertram, in particular, was conceived in 1942 to deceive Erwin Rommel and his troops in the months leading up to the second battle of El Alamein. Large sets were built in northern Egypt to mislead aerial reconnaissance – such as the extensive construction of a fake Alexandria harbour – often completed with the help of local Egyptian labourers exploited through colonial compulsion. Barkas’s manual \u003Ci>Concealment in the Field\u003C/i> (1941) codified the desert of El Alamein into patterns and abstractions that lent themselves to visual manipulation. The landscape was reduced to its surface – catalogued into categories such as ‘plain velvet’, ‘wadi pattern’, ‘polka dot pattern’ – and thus emptied of the histories and lives it contained.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">1\u003C/span> The Directorate’s illusions depended on the abstraction of land and an ‘imperial visuality’ that ultimately ‘classifies, separates, and renders territory available for appropriation’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">2\u003C/span> Transformed into a laboratory for military visual technologies, northern Egypt was reframed as a stage set for imperial war fought between European actors. The desert, for the camoufleurs, was not a lived landscape but an optical problem to be solved.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":194,"figures":236},[237,246],{"image":238,"caption":244},[239],{"id":240,"path":241,"alt":12,"title":242,"width":243,"height":189,"mimeType":190},"4624","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-4-A-Martin-Baltimore-of-No.-21-Squadron-SAAF-flies-over-the-target-area.jpg","Fig 4 A Martin Baltimore of No 21 Squadron SAAF flies over the target area",761,{"html":245},"\u003Cp>A Martin Baltimore of No. 21 Squadron SAAF flies over the target area as bombs explode on enemy transport widely dispersed near the Rahman Track, near El Alamein, 1942. © IWM (CM 5905)\u003C/p>",{"image":247,"caption":253},[248],{"id":249,"path":250,"alt":12,"title":251,"width":189,"height":252,"mimeType":190},"4625","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-5-A-salvo-of-bombs-from-Martin-Baltimore-of-No.-21-Squadron-SAAF-explodes-on-enemy-transport.jpg","Fig 5 A salvo of bombs from Martin Baltimore of No 21 Squadron SAAF explodes on enemy transport",698,{"html":254},"\u003Cp>A salvo of bombs from Martin Baltimore of No. 21 Squadron SAAF explodes on enemy transport on the road between el Daba and Fuka, Egypt, at the start of the enemy’s withdrawal from the Battle of El Alamein. © IWM (CM 3842)\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":256},{"html":257},"\u003Cp>This theatre of deception was staged explicitly for the eye in the sky. The intention was never to live with the land but to manipulate its image as seen from above.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">3\u003C/span> Camouflage was not merely a tactic – it was an apparatus of knowledge production. As Barkas himself later wrote, the task of the operation was to design illusions that ‘read correctly’ in aerial photographs taken by enemy planes; the war became legible primarily through its images.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">4\u003C/span> The aerial gaze was, thus, the decisive vantage point of the North African campaign. Camouflage was part of a broader colonial optic that transformed North Africa into a field of visibility; in particular, the desert of El Alamein was a struggle carried out through and against the image. \u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":194,"figures":259},[260,269],{"image":261,"caption":267},[262],{"id":263,"path":264,"alt":12,"title":265,"width":189,"height":266,"mimeType":190},"4555","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-3-Dummy-cruiser-tanks-being-constructed-by-Royal-Engineers.jpg","Fig 3 Dummy cruiser tanks being constructed by Royal Engineers",644,{"html":268},"\u003Cp>Dummy cruiser tanks being constructed by Royal Engineers in a factory near Rouen, 30 March 1940. © IWM (F 3820)\u003C/p>",{"image":270,"caption":276},[271],{"id":272,"path":273,"alt":12,"title":274,"width":188,"height":275,"mimeType":190},"4627","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-7-Photograph-of-the-framework-of-a-dummy-tank-under-construction.jpg","Fig 7 Photograph of the framework of a dummy tank under construction",541,{"html":277},"\u003Cp>Photograph of the framework of a dummy tank under construction at the Middle East School of Camouflage in the Western Desert, 1942. Photo by Captain Gerald Leet. Chiswick Chap / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":279},{"html":280},"\u003Cp>It is not insignificant that artists proved central to the British military’s strategies of deception. Many of them were engaged in the Surrealist movement: their expertise in optics, disorientation, and the manipulation of scale allowed them to reconceptualise the battlefield as an image to be staged for the aerial perspective. Roland Penrose, a central figure of British Surrealism, had already been advocating camouflage as a form of artistic research even before the war began. He gave lectures on camouflage to the Home Guard, using painted props and photographic slides as well as drawing from art history and Surrealist experiments in perception, to demonstrate how techniques of optical deception could be harnessed for military purposes.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">5\u003C/span> This was not a marginal contribution but an integral tactic: the Surrealist imagination was weaponised, transforming avant-garde experiments in estrangement into operational tools of empire. Yet the camoufleurs’ work also reveals how artistic practice itself generates knowledge; through acts of making and testing, they developed methodologies that exposed the mechanics of seeing during war. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The aerial photograph, the reconnaissance film, and the deceptive dummy installation were all instances of what filmmaker Harun Farocki referred to as ‘operational images’: images that are not intended for human spectatorship but, being part of a process, are designed to direct operations.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">6\u003C/span> What was staged in the desert in El Alamein prefigured today’s operational scopic regimes – where images do not merely represent but also act as weapons. The camoufleurs, in this case, were already producing images that \u003Ci>acted\u003C/i>: the dummy tanks were constructed so they would register as ‘real’ in reconnaissance photos, while the camouflaged pipelines were designed to misdirect enemy intelligence.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">7\u003C/span>\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":194,"figures":282},[283,290],{"image":284,"caption":288},[285],{"id":286,"path":287,"alt":12,"title":187,"width":188,"height":189,"mimeType":190},"4628","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-8-Troops-carrying-a-dummy-Stuart-tank-3-April-1942.jpg",{"html":289},"\u003Cp>Troops carrying a dummy Stuart tank, 3 April 1942. Photo: George Groom. © IWM (E 10147)\u003C/p>",{"image":291,"caption":298},[292],{"id":293,"path":294,"alt":12,"title":295,"width":296,"height":297,"mimeType":190},"4629","Read/Opacity-as-Resistance-Reversing-the-Image-Politics-of-Empire/Fig.-9-Western-Desert-Egypt-22-August.jpeg","Fig 9 Western Desert Egypt 22 August",640,495,{"html":299},"\u003Cp>\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C8681\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Western Desert, Egypt\u003C/a>, 22 August: The Germans wasted a lot of ammunition on this dummy tank, set up for just that purpose, near El Alamein. Public domain.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":301},{"html":302},"\u003Cp>The Directorate designed objects to be viewed from above – for the German Luftwaffe camera – rather than below. The camoufleurs contributed to a transformation in visuality whereby the image-referent no longer needed to be convincing to the human eye at ground level: these were not images to be admired, but images to deceive the gaze from above. In his theory of non-ocular sight, Farocki states that owing to the increasingly machinic, ‘operational’ production of images, the photograph did not even need to deceive the aerial photographer; rather, it needed to deceive the machinic gaze. This recalibration of perception – from embodied to machinic vision – paved the way for contemporary regimes of drone vision, satellite imaging, and algorithmic targeting. \u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":304,"richText":305},{"html":5},{"html":306},"\u003Cp>The aerial vision first exercised in North Africa was steeped in Orientalist tropes and a mode of perception that exposes the so-called Orient as governable and subordinate. Western epistemologies have long called for transparency that deem all subjects visible, knowable, and legible. This motivation is bound to colonial domination; how ‘to know’ the other was always a means to classify and control. Indeed, colonial photography established a precedent for contemporary visual technologies that continue to demand legibility from racialised and gendered subjects.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">8\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Contemporary data extraction – not unlike colonial data gathering – appropriates human life and encodes racialised and Orientalist biases into algorithms and databases. Digital Orientalism, as it has come to be called, emerges from the colonial scopic regime, extending its logic from the photographic archive to the digital cloud, from the reconnaissance image to the drone feed.\u003Csup> \u003C/sup>Under colonial rule, landscapes in the Middle East and Africa have historically been used and continue to be utilised as laboratories for nuclear testing, drone warfare, and surveillance technologies.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">9\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This is not incidental: the logics rehearsed in Egypt that once transformed the desert into an optical stage for deception now sustain the testing grounds of algorithmic warfare for colonial and neocolonial powers. Gaza and the West Bank, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Sahel have been repeatedly instrumentalised as experimental terrains where new techniques of sensing, targeting, and automated killing are trialled before they are deployed and capitalised on elsewhere.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">10\u003C/span>\u003Csup> \u003C/sup>The question that arises here is how marginalised and targeted populations can evade the ubiquitous gaze of the machine for their own survival, and also intervene in the algorithmic logic of AI to take back control of their own image.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>All of this leads me to ask: if camouflage under empire exemplified a scopic regime of domination, can camouflage be reimagined otherwise? Camouflage, as a warfare strategy, was never a disruption of colonial vision but rather an extension of it. The illusions engineered by the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate worked because they engaged the aerial gaze; camouflage, in this case, was a form of image-making that crystallised the violence of colonial vision and imperial control, which is rooted in the dispossession of the land and its people. Instead, how can camouflage be used as a methodology to undo the political mechanisms embedded in contemporary representation? \u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":308,"richText":310},{"html":309},"3",{"html":311},"\u003Cp>What would it look like to reverse the logic of image politics of the last 200 years? This question is particularly urgent in the current political climate, where marginalised populations are hyper-visible to militarised technologies such as drones, biometric recognition, satellite monitoring, and predictive artificial intelligence, but they are invisible to the protections of law.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">11\u003C/span> Édouard Glissant’s call for a ‘right to opacity’ offers a provisional starting point to think about camouflage outside of its colonial, military history.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">12\u003C/span>\u003Csup> \u003C/sup>If we consider Glissant’s key points in his \u003Ci>Poetics of Relation\u003C/i> (1997), opacity is understood as a model of resistance to Western modernity’s imperative that everything should be explainable, if not transparent (to the ethnographic impulse of the colonial scopic regime, for example). Opacity as a form of resisting appropriation becomes an affirmation of the right to remain unassimilated, or consumed, through and by the colonial gaze.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":220,"image":313,"caption":320,"width":322,"ratio":323},[314],{"id":315,"path":316,"alt":12,"title":317,"width":318,"height":319,"mimeType":190},"6019","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-10-Hide-and-Seek-A-Story-of-Concealment-Camouflage-Development-and-Training-Centre.jpg","Fig 10 Hide and Seek A Story of Concealment Camouflage Development and Training Centre",1200,1811,{"html":321},"\u003Cp>\u003Ci>Hide and Seek: A Story of Concealment\u003C/i>, Camouflage Development and Training Centre. Date unknown. © IWM (LBY [O] 90 / 2334-1)\u003C/p>","narrow","portrait",{"typeHandle":220,"image":325,"caption":331,"width":230,"ratio":231},[326],{"id":327,"path":328,"alt":12,"title":329,"width":318,"height":330,"mimeType":190},"6017","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-11-Hide-and-Seek-A-Story-of-Concealment-Camouflage-Development-and-Training-Centre-v2.jpg","Fig 11 Hide and Seek A Story of Concealment Camouflage Development and Training Centre v2",924,{"html":321},{"typeHandle":214,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":333},{"html":334},"\u003Cp>What I want to contemplate here is what counts as a legitimate view: who gets to look, and under what terms? To be opaque, in this case, is not to disappear; it is to insist on being encountered without reduction, to refuse capture (assimilation) by the observer. To undo the logic of image-making is to live in ways that cannot be fully translated into the categories of empire or algorithm. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>For the camoufleurs, artistic experimentation became a methodology for domination that was subordinate to the colonial gaze. To revisit those methods today means one must acknowledge their alignment with military objectives and how artistic practice was instrumentalised to maintain structures of violence. To reclaim camouflage, then, is to reverse the theatre of deception inaugurated in North Africa.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Whereas the Camouflage Directorate transformed the desert into spectacle for imperial optics, counter-camouflage reclaims concealment as a mode of resistance to being seen. To conduct research through images, where practice enacts a critical methodology, can offer a way to engage the condition of optical resistance – not by rejecting images but by intervening in their logic of visibility.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":336,"title":337,"richText":338},"footnotes","Notes",{"html":339},"\u003Cp>Geoffrey Barkas, \u003Ci>Concealment in the Field\u003C/i>, no. 1, 1941. Middle East training pamphlet. See images on pp. 13–15.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Nicholas Mirzoeff, \u003Ci>The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality\u003C/i>, Duke University Press, 2011, 3.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The aerial gaze and the development of drone warfare against the backdrop of Middle Eastern geographies (particularly Egypt and Palestine) is the subject of my long-term work \u003Ci>The General’s Stork\u003C/i> (2016-ongoing). The project traces how the skies above the Middle East are still militarised theatres of vision. Beginning with the absurd 2013 incident in which Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork suspected of espionage, the project unravels a history of birds entangled with aerial surveillance – from carrier pigeons and avian-inspired drone prototypes to the ‘mechanical birds’ of contemporary warfare. This work highlights how war zones in the Middle East and Africa continue to serve as laboratories for developing and testing surveillance technologies, where the continuity with colonial scopic regimes and Orientalist ways of seeing are evident. See Heba Y. Amin,\u003Ci> The General’s Stork\u003C/i>, ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2020. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Geoffrey Barkas, \u003Ci>The Camouflage Story (from Aintree to Alamein)\u003C/i>, Cassell, 1952, 158–75.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Roland Penrose’s \u003Ci>Home Guard Manual of Camouflage\u003C/i> (1941) codified these ideas into an instructional text, bridging the gap between avant-garde art and tactical concealment. Additional artists included Julian Trevelyan, Colin Moss, and the stage magician Jasper Maskelyne. See Roland Penrose, \u003Ci>The Home Guard Manual of Camouflage\u003C/i>, George Allen & Unwin, 1941.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Harun Farocki, ‘Phantom Images’, \u003Ci>Public\u003C/i> 29, 2004, 12–22.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Barkas, \u003Ci>The Camouflage Story\u003C/i>, 158–75.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>In his film \u003Ci>Images of the World and the Inscription of War\u003C/i> (1988), Harun Farocki critiques the politics of this process in his analysis of the French colonial photo book \u003Ci>Femmes Algériennes\u003C/i> (produced by Marc Garanger and published in 1960). The bureaucratic photographs of Algerian female subjects, which were framed as ethnographic documents, are revealed as acts of violation, stripping women of privacy in order to incorporate them into the colonial archive. This history of visual intrusion is likewise addressed in my work \u003Ci>Windows on the West\u003C/i> (2019), which focuses on the first photograph taken on the African continent as a means to reexamine Orientalism’s voyeuristic obsession with access and exposure. The photograph in question, an architectural depiction of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s ‘harem’ palace in Alexandria, shows no evidence of women’s bodies, only the windows on which the Orientalist fantasy can be projected. See Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey, ‘The Techno-Politics of Programming Vision’, \u003Ci>Visual Studies\u003C/i>, vol. 38, no. 2, 2023, 192–95.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>My work \u003Ci>Atom Elegy\u003C/i> (2022) addresses France’s nuclear testing in Reggane, Algeria (1960–61). These atmospheric explosions, which marked France’s entry into the nuclear age, contaminated the desert with radioactive toxins, leaving enduring harm on local populations and their environment. The work investigates an image that depicts two rows of dummies awaiting the detonation of an atomic bomb. Through a miniature model reconstruction of the photograph, the work attempts to materialise the catastrophic vision of nuclear destruction. To this day, France has never been held accountable for the lingering fallout inflicted on its former colony. See ‘Programmed Visions and Techno-Fossils: Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey in Conversation’, \u003Ci>Third Text Online\u003C/i>, 21 July 2022,\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.thirdtext.org/downey-amin\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> www.thirdtext.org/downey-amin\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>\u003Cp> The report ‘Deadly Algorithms: Destructive Role of Artificial Intelligence in Gaza War’ (2025), published by the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), reveals that warfare is rapidly changing due to artificial intelligence. Deploying their deadly algorithmic models on the Palestinian population, AI-driven systems, such as Lavender and Habsora, are being used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to ‘minimise human intervention in identification and elimination of threats and speed up operations’. See Sibel Düz and Muhammed Sefa Koçakoğlu, \u003Ci>Deadly Algorithms: Destructive Role of Artificial Intelligence in Gaza War\u003C/i>, SETA Foundation Publication no. 260, February 2025, \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://media.setav.org/en/file/2025/02/deadly-algorithms-destructive-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-gaza-war.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https://media.setav.org/en/file/2025/02/deadly-algorithms-destructive-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-gaza-war.pdf\u003C/a>. See also Antony Lowenstein, \u003Ci>The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World\u003C/i>, Verso, 2023.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’ addresses how the gaze of surveillance determines who is rendered visible as a target and who disappears into statistical abstraction. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintje, \u003Ci>Public Culture\u003C/i> 15, no. 1, 2003, 11–40.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Édouard Glissant, \u003Ci>Poetics of Relation\u003C/i>, trans. 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